More than the U.S. military ever knew, the Sunni tribes in Iraq prevented America's long, searing occupation from descending into an even bigger fiasco than it was. That's just one lesson the U.S. is missing by not taking advantage of the biggest data trove of the war: the accounts of Iraqis who lived through it.
In the popular American conception of the Iraq war, the tribes didn't play a significant role in the war until around 2006, when they abruptly defected from the Sunni insurgency to stand with U.S. forces during the surge. The brutality of al-Qaida in Iraq ' who would punish the ostensible sin of cigarette smoking by chopping off the fingers of the Sunnis they claimed to protect ' compelled one of the most momentous strategic shifts of the war.
That is nowhere near the complete truth, according to Najim Abed al-Jabouri. Jabouri was a two-star general in Saddam Hussein's army who became one of America's most prominent and heralded partners against the extremist forces in Iraq that killed nearly 4,500 U.S. troops. Jabouri was the key Iraqi partner for U.S. Army then-Col. H.R. McMaster in Tall Afar, a city that became a proving ground for the counterinsurgency strategy that Gen. David Petraeus would later implement and make famous.
'For a long time after the invasion,' Jabouri recollects for Danger Room, 'the tribal leaders were telling people, 'Shut up, shut up, don't cause problems.' There was a big expectation of inclusion.' That expectation kept more of Sunni Iraq out of the insurgency than the U.S. understands, for years, as the Sunnis tribal leaders thought that it was inevitable that Americans 'would be like the Brits when they occupied Iraq. We thought they would reach out to the tribes, work with the established order.'
As a result, the Sunni insurgency ' one of the main hotbeds of resistance to the U.S. occupation ' was never as deadly as Jabouri believes it could have been. Tribal leaders that Jabouri knew from his army days 'had weapons caches in the desert. They were getting ready.'
Even with those caches remaining in reserve, the Iraq war was agony for the soldiers and marines tasked with pacifying unfamiliar Sunni areas in Baghdad, Ramadi and Baquba. In 2006, according to statistics kept by the Pentagon's bomb squad, insurgents manufactured and detonated 30,822 homemade bombs, often from ordnance harvested and repurposed from the weapons depots that ex-officers like Jabouri relied on during their service. Not only did the Iraqis frustrate American efforts at defeating the bombs, their homebrewed arsenal created a weapons template for insurgencies worldwide.
To Jabouri, the insurgency, al-Qaida included, was a lame, unimpressive fighting force. With merely equivocal backing from the tribal power structure, the inevitable resistance to the occupation 'was more emotional and random,' he says. 'There were a lot of different movements on the ground, and they weren't organized with each other.' Saddam Hussein's military, contrary to a strain of conventional American thinking, was not relying on a post-invasion insurgency as a Plan B.
Two months before the 2003 invasion, Jabouri says, the Iraqi defense minister, Sultan Hashem, assembled his top generals in Baghdad to discuss the impending American incursion. 'He told us we can't confront America and win,' Jabouri, then despondent over the invasion, recollects. But there was never a discussion, let alone an order, to melt away into the populace once the invasion occurred.
'There wasn't planning for resistance,' Jabouri remembers. 'The Iraqi leadership, if they were to announce that or plan for that, it would mean that we would be defeated! It's not a sign of strength.' Not only did that limit participation in the resistance from Saddam's Baathist forces ' contrary to years of statements from the Washington ' it set a tone to the officers that the remnants of Saddam's leadership structure was a spent force, and so 'we returned to our tribes.' Jabouri took his family to Mosul, in the north, recognizing a center of power and influence that Americans never fully understood.
They still might not, ten years after the invasion. The premiere repositories of institutional U.S. military knowledge have few studies of the Iraq war through Iraqi eyes. The Army's Center for Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Ks., one of the its main memory banks, 'does not, in fact, have any lessons learned materials from Iraq from the insurgents' perspective,' Bill Ackerly from the center's Army parent organization tells Danger Room. That's despite volumes of human-terrain studies and detainee interrogation reports; access to tens of thousands of ex-insurgents who ended up siding with the Americans; and a general, vague U.S. understanding that human networks are decisive in insurgencies. West Point's Combating Terrorism Center has a tremendously informative trove of documents captured from al-Qaida in Iraq, but it sheds most of its light on non-Iraqi terrorists.
The Marines do better. Marine Corps University compiled and published a multi-volume oral history of the Anbar Awakening, the major Sunni tribal uprising that began in 2006 against al-Qaida, complete with Iraqi perspectives. 'It's a very good place to start, but it's not a complete view,' says Sterling Jensen, a 35-year old researcher at National Defense University who seeks to fill the gap.
Jensen is writing his Ph. D on the Iraqi insurgency ' from the insurgents' perspective. Stretching back to interviews he first conducted as a contract translator in Ramadi in 2006, Jensen has spent years collecting Iraqi accounts of their varied experiences at resistance, insurgency and terrorism, centering on mostly-Sunni organizations like the 1920 Revolution Brigades, Ansar al-Islam, and even the Islamic State of Iraq, as al-Qaida's local chapter likes to call itself.
From Jensen's perspective, the tribes 'didn't really want to fight the Americans.' Some did, but it was mostly transactional, as they hewed to the belief that they could make money off the insurgency than they could working with the largely Shia government or the Americans. 'The tribes weren't working against the Americans from the start,' Jensen tells Danger Room.
And the story of the Anbar Awakening isn't the typical 'surge' narrative of the Americans suddenly revamping their tactics and protecting the population. It's a story of al-Qaida vastly overplaying its hand and attacking the tribes ' and the Americans finally being savvy enough to take yes for an answer from a Sunni power structure it had long antagonized. 'Had al-Qaida not overreached,' Jensen says, 'then the Sunni community would not have joined with the U.S. It doesn't matter what COIN [counterinsurgency] you use.'
It remains unclear how interested the U.S. is in hearing the Iraq war told from Iraqis, something sure to be an uncomfortable experience. Ackerly says he expects an impending revision of the Army's now-iconic counterinsurgency manual, expected by the end of the year, will have information on the organization, structure and tactics of the insurgency 'from the perspective of the insurgent' in Iraq. But that's not finalized, and it's also something of a circumscribed perspective.
'If we had a better understanding of what went on in Iraq, based on what the Iraqis were saying,' Jensen contends, 'we would learn how to better [military] engagements in the future. We won't be as timid because we'd have a little bit more confidence that we understand what's going on on the ground. We'd be more effective.'
Not of that helps Jabouri ' and it certainly doesn't help the tens of thousands of dead Iraqis. The 57-year old former officer has lived in the United States since late 2008, after becoming a target for al-Qaida and the Shiite government for working closely with the Americans. While he concedes that 'many people feel it was better under Saddam,' Jabouri says he's optimistic about Iraq's future and wants to return someday.
'Maybe after we have a democracy in Iraq,' he says.
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